The Music Industry in the UK is Changing

Within a year, the number of streamed music on platforms such as Spotify, Google Play or Deezer has doubled. By being on the top 5, Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, Hozier, Drake and Rihanna are generating a huge amount of music played every day.

The UK is experiencing a revolution in the way Brits listen to their music. Nowadays, streaming no longer means bad quality and this might be one of the reasons why the record has been broken-with 500m songs streamed in the UK market in only one week.

Streaming is spreading fast and this can be illustrated by the worldwide number of paid Spotify subscribers that have increased from 15m in January to 20m in June 2015. Moreover, Spotify currently has a total of 75 million active users.

Even if Spotify covers a huge part of the streaming market, the competition is growing. Last month Apple launched a streaming service and today there are some rumours saying that Facebook is also about to break through the streaming industry.

In the UK, the total sales of physical format music is decreasing, although vinyl increased its popularity lately. Nonetheless, the UK music market is still made of approximately 60% of physical products.

However, this tendency allows the industry to hope that the streaming growth tendency will continue to accelerate. Nevertheless, it is not clear if this trend will increase the artist’s revenues as the figures don’t differentiate paid subscribers from the users exploiting the service for free.

After having succeeded to convince users, now the biggest challenge is to convince musicians and songwriters. Many artists complained about the little money they receive from streaming. Some of them even refused to be present on this kind of platforms. Swift and AC/DC are known for being resistant towards these practices, although both of them have lately started to allow their music available on streaming.